Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - United Breaks Guitars

Music can sometimes change the world. Less often, it can make corporations admit their mistakes, as happened when United Breaks Guitars took Sons Of Maxwell's complaints about United Airlines to five million viewers. (Worth remembering that a letter to Esther Rantzen would have got a larger audience in the 1970s.)

Today, Christopher Elliott asks Barbara Higgins, United vice president of customer contact centers, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a musical consumer campaign:

As Mr. Carroll has said directly, the agent he encountered is a great employee, unflappable and acted in the interests of the United policies she represented, and we couldn’t agree more. But in all candor, Mr. Carrroll has made his point, we have incorporated the experience into our training.

How, exactly, would a video like this be incorporated into training?

It will provide all of us — regardless of where we work or in which department — with an example of how we can be more empathetic to our guests when situations suggest we should. In our business, how we conduct ourselves is important, and our employees understand that treating each other and our guests in a courteous and respectful manner is a vital part of running a good airline.

More viruses than an unpatched XP machine

We're still unsure if this incredibly smart, or just fascinatingly lazy: the Weezer Pork and Beans video attempts to go super-viral by packing in references to 24 other viral videos.



Valleywag lists all 24 memes being mined; we can't help being reminded of that health check Monty Burns had where he was told he had so many diseases, they were keeping him alive by canceling each other out.